Following the news that Indonesia’s ride-hailing company Gojek is in the final stages of acquiring Jakarta-based mobile point-of-sale (POS) start-up Moka for approximately US$120m;

Animesh Kumar, Director of Automotive Consulting at GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company, offers his view:

“The move is in line with Gojek’s plan to emerge as a leading player in Indonesia’s digital payments industry. Moka facilitates point-of-sale (POS) payments by letting merchants accept card or mobile payments. Moka also helps in tracking sales and inventory, managing employees and running loyalty programs. The startup’s users include retail outlets as well as eateries.

“The two parties were in talks earlier this year as well but they were interrupted when Gojek founder and ex-CEO Nadiem Marakim left the post to join the Indonesian government as Minister of Education and Culture.

“Gojek, Indonesia’s most valuable startup at US$10bn and the country’s first decacorn, has been using acquisition as a strategy to achieve its goal over the past few years. The company is primarily competing with Singapore’s Grab in South-east Asia. GoPay, Gojek’s in-app digital payments service, acquired domestic group-saving network Mapan in 2017. In the same year, Gojek bought two FinTech firms in Indonesia—offline payments-processing company Kartuku and online-payment gateway Midtrans. All the three payments companies cater to a different segment. The strategy seems to be to combine the capabilities of the acquired businesses with GoPay to become the leading player in the digital payments industry in Indonesia.

“The move also makes sense for other reasons. Gojek is one of the few domestic apps that have achieved mass scale. GoPay is accepted by over 420,000 online as well as offline merchants across Indonesia as of October 2019. Most of these merchants are small or medium size businesses. Hence, the acquisition by Gojek will give Moka access to tens of millions of customers and vast merchant network. On the other hand, Moka will help Gojek in (a) offering a better service bundle to merchants, (b) possibly expanding merchant network and (c) higher monetization from each merchant in its network.”